Refractive Africa

by Will Alexander

Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize
Winner of the California Book Award in Poetry

Three kinetically distilled long poems by the singular American poet who “transfigures ‘thought’ into a weave of lexical magic” (Philip Lamantia)   “The poet is endemic with life itself,” Will Alexander once said, and in this searing pas de trois, Refractive Africa: Ballet of the Forgotten , he has exemplified this vital candescence with a transpersonal amplification worthy of the Cambrian explosion. “This being the ballet of the forgotten,” he writes as diasporic witness, “of refracted boundary points as venom.” The volume’s opening poem pays homage to the innovative Nigerian-Yoruban author Amos Tutuola; it ends with an encomium to the modernist Malagasy poet Jean-Joseph Rabearivelo―two writers whose luminous art suffered “colonial wrath through refraction.” A tribute to the Congo forms the bridge and brisé vole of the book: the Congo as “charged aural colony” and “primal interconnection,” a “subliminal psychic force” with a colonial and postcolonial history dominated by the Occident. Will Alexander’s improvisatory cosmicity pushes poetic language to the point of most resistance―incantatory and swirling with magical laterality and recovery.

Genres: Poetry

112 pages, Paperback

First published November 2, 2021

About the author

Born in 1948, Will Alexander is a poet, novelist, essayist, playwright, visual artist and pianist. He was the recipient of a Whiting Fellowship for Poetry in 2001 and a California Arts Council Fellowship in 2002. He was also the subject of a colloquium published in the prestigious African American cultural journal, Callaloo in 1999. Author of nine previous books, Alexander has taught at various colleges including University of California, San Diego, New College (San Francisco, CA), Hofstra University, and Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, in addition to being associated with the nonprofit organization Theatre of Hearts/Youth First, serving at-risk youth. He is a lifelong resident of Los Angeles.

Reviews

[Caspar "moved to storygraph" Bryant · Rating 5 out of 5]

High expectations met and developed. My first from Alexander which inherits for him the convoluted, geometric knot-poetry we see in the convoluted and reductive line of JH Prynne, early WSG, certain notes of Dylan Thomas, Oli Hazzard, and probably GMH. I can see the Lamantia influence heavy here but this work is something else. I really struggle to recall a poet so volcanic, so serpentine.
But with all this power, Alexander's magmic undertow, Refractive Africa feels honed, a white hot core. It doesn't explode but unfolds as the Congo river (untied knot? Speak to JD). This really isn't one I expect to be popular but it has the sense of a crucial development to me, possesses something contemporary poetry in the UK lacks at the moment. Shamanic.

So it's an explicitly postcolonial text. I'm curious about the place of anger. WA doesn't spare scorn for the European nations involved in the colonization of Africa but I couldn't describe his expression as rage. Unless a volcano rages.

as for Europe
it equates suffering with destiny
& so
suffering for them remains holiness
& according to this calculus
the Congolese are holy

As I was reading I copied down lines on the page they were written, rather than annotating per tradition. Was affirming. I went for lines specifically regarding what WA considers his poetry is, what refraction means, what dreams and fire can be.

I call it boldness
I call it extended verbal drawl
where resurrection exists as raw superlatives & plurals
like a serpent that vomits up gold

cross pollination by cacophony

This is one I've been meaning to pick up since it came out. Was annoyed that goodreads didn't have the prettier UK cover so have added it. He moves me I want to write on him and the others.

seducing reality by inflammatory crystal
by phonemes spun from eclipse & fire
as if you counted sapphires in your sleep

[Craig Werner · Rating 4 out of 5]

Dense, sometimes difficult--it sent me to the dictionary more often than any book I've read in a while--but very smart and worth the effort. Don't even try if you can't give it some extended attention at each reading session.

In three long poems--one a tribute to Amos Tutuola, one to Madascar poet Jean-Joseph Rabearivelo--Alexander casts himself as a Sangoma, a griot type figure channeling African cultural energies into a resistant world. The third poem is a searching engagement with the tangled histories--linguistic, economic, cultural, military--of the Congo. For me, the Tutuola piece is the touchstone, a linguistic reflection of the unbounded energies of the continent with the constrictive colonialist forces.

A sample (actually on the more direct side of the lines):

this ignites suffering made manifest as cliche
& this suffering remains our hidden planetary equation

& so as sangoma
as architect of levels never seen
I must remain still
in order to brew feral medicine as revenge (p. 50)

In addition to Tutuola, the points of reference that came to mind were Nathaniel Mackey and Jay Wright, two elder cousins who share both the difficulty and the reward.

[Curtis · Rating 3 out of 5]

Three long poems:
Beautiful imagery, but
the first and third ones
were exactly the same,
and the middle one started off cool
but then kept repeating itself, going
on and
on and
on and
on and

[Ana · Rating 5 out of 5]

'Eruption from the Compound of Living', for Jean-Joseph Rabearivelo, will live in my heart forever. Head ringing with the aural.

[julia · Rating 1 out of 5]

its astonishing to me how someone can write so much yet say so little. this author was writing shit like "inevitable colloquy freed from vexatious imposition". fuck does that even mean. guys like this are what encourage my belief that poetry is a fucking joke. what an absolute pisstake. and now i thought this would be interesting since it discusses the colonisation of africa and the feelings of its oppressed indigenous people. but alas we cannot trust this writer with a single actually meaningful topic because he'll just shit on it and slap that onto paper and call it poetry. this lazy joke of a collection of "poems" has made me so viscerally angry i might actually burn it. someone please take the ideas from this book and artfully and cleverly express them, ideally in novel form, so i feel ever so slightly compensated for this waste of time.

[Juliano · Rating 3 out of 5]

“I am speaking of hunger here & not of an intellectual constant that measures need against graft”. It’s a rare and quite interesting thing for me to read a book that I know is of good quality, and that I know has something vital to say, and yet to find myself unable to enjoy the book regardless, and Refractive Africa — Will Alexander’s forthcoming collection from Granta Poetry, due in January 2022 — is such a book. Collating three long poems about colonialism, climate change and diaspora, Refractive Africa felt too much like theory for me — so bogged down in heavy, monosyllabic + often jargonistic words that I found it difficult to read and even more difficult to really take in. As a reader of poetry, I look for a certain level of accessibility, and I don’t believe that poetry has to pander in order to reach more people clearly and coherently; and when the stakes of what’s being said are so high, that sense of immediacy only becomes more important, in my eyes. That all said, Alexander is clearly a gifted linguist, his constructions and cadences often mesmerising: “unfixed / reckless & inspirational with baffling / perhaps failure as innate ferocity / summoned from variety eclectic with error”, written and delivered with such daring flow; and, later, the striking, excoriating image that he captures in a line about “superseding the aristocracy of diamonds”. At times, Alexander is almost playful in his serious searching: “I ask rhetorically / how does clarity prevail?” Perhaps my own reading fatigue is at fault, but I would probably struggle recommending this book to any casual reader of poetry, or even anyone not overly invested in a style of poetry more academic than expressive.

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fever dream in which all colonial systems have collapsed and the thickets of jargon are woven together into something new. Bookended by two homages in the second person, the main section is a long meditation on the Congo. Superlatives are always staking out territories and capabilities beyond the denuded graveyard that is the Congo, but never attempting to get clear of it so much as to air it out for whatever lies ahead.

[David Given Schwarm · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fantastic book by LA's best poet. Coming off the success of his Pocket Poet City Light's book, this collection is more of the same spaced-out wild ride--a bit more historical and Afrocentric, but still a very wild ride.

[Sam Swanson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Gets a little annoying at times tbh but still super interesting

[Sam · Rating 5 out of 5]

1. what?
2. holy shit
3. how have I never heard of Will Alexander until right now